After disaster: Salvage or savage logging?

Opposing views on the value of timber harvests after natural disasters

After spectacular wildfires two years ago left behind hundreds of thousands
of charred acres in the Bitterroot National Forest in western Montana,
one might not think there's much of value left behind.

But, in fact, there is a lot of value in the blackened and burned treesenough
to go to court over, because two opposing sides see very different value
in those trees. A logger sees wood that can be salvaged and sold as well
as an opportunity to help clean out the forest to help it quickly become
a place where trees grow again. An environmentalist sees the value in
the trees' ability to hold the soil, eventually decay, nourish the soil
and help the forest renew in its own time.

Each view has vocal supporters, especially in the Bitterroot. The U.S.
Forest Service, the manager and guardian of the forest, listened to those
points while coming up with a post-fire management plan and decided to
let many burned acres stand untouched but allow loggers to salvage wood
in some areas.

On the way up to one Bitterroot timber sale area, "you can see thousands
and thousands of burned acres where there will never be any [logging]
activity," said Gordy Sanders of Pyramid Mountain Lumber, based in
Seeley Lake, Mont. His company is salvaging trees from selected burned
areas of the Bitterroot.

The decision to allow salvage logging continues a vigorous public debate
in Montanaand throughout the nationabout how national forests
are managed. The Forest Service typically allows some salvage logging
after disastersonly in nonwilderness areason the belief that
pinpointed harvests will help prevent future secondary fires fueled by
the dead trees, grass and brush. Those blazes could burn more intensely
than the original fires and threaten additional lives, officials say.

Environmentalists didn't agree in the case of the Bitterroot, and the
matter was taken to court, a common occurrence for timber harvests in
national forests.

Economy vs. ecology

Fires burned 307,000 acres of land in the Bitterroot National Forest,
about 20 percent of its 1.6 million acres. The Forest Service originally
proposed salvage logging on a little less than one-quarter of the burned
area. But public opposition, court battles and other factors will likely
cut the final harvest to less than 5 percent of the burned acreage.

The Forest Service first set the salvage logging area at 73,000 acres.
But after strong public outcry over the proposal, it cut the figure to
41,000 acres, with an expected yield of about 176 million board feet of
sawtimber (a board foot is a one-foot square of wood that is
one-inch thick). Environmentalists were still not happy and took the matter
to court, where a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the modified plan
needed public comment, saying the Forest Service made an "extra legal
effort to circumvent the law," and only certain portions of the forest
could be logged immediately.

That ruling "temporarily" reduced the salvage logging acreage
to 14,000, but the time sensitivity of salvage logging likely means that
will be the total harvest. To begin with, the value of the damaged trees
is lower and expenses are higher than logging green trees. Fallen or burned
trees have a harvest window of about two years before the wood becomes
commercially useless. The Bitterroot trees, mostly ponderosa pine and
Douglas fir, tend to attract bark beetles or blue-stain fungus (which
literally turns the wood blue).

The court order was issued in January 2002, leaving little time to harvest
even the 14,000 acres that were approved. In a March interview, Spike
Thompson, acting supervisor of the Bitterroot National Forest, said, "The
reality is that this is the second winter after the fire and the values
are dwindling to where it may not be economically feasible to do those
projects."

That suits environmentalists just fine; they say the heavy logging equipment
causes further damage to the forest. They also charge that timber management
seems to have a higher priority for the Forest Service than preservation
because it brings in money and helps the agency grow.

According to Larry Campbell, executive director of Friends of the Bitterroot,
one of the plaintiffs in the salvage lawsuit, the Forest Service wants
to take too much out of the ecosystem. Even pared down to 14,000 acres,
the expected yield of 60 million board feet would be about six times larger
than the forest's annual harvest. Campbell noted that forests have burned
and regenerated for thousands of years without people taking away the
damaged trees.
"We don't need it," Campbell said. "There's no ecological
need for salvage logging."

Still, logging in the Bitterroot region is and has been the livelihood
for generations of families, and even more are employed in the wood products
manufacturing business in the forest's Ravalli County home. More than
10 percent of the county's 7,800 workers work in the timber and wood products
industry.

Salvage logging, often accompanied by other recovery efforts such as planting
and reseeding, also pushes nature to recover more quickly, with different
kinds of vegetation, than if left alone, supporters of active management
say. It will benefit both the forest's health and the local economy, creating
employment opportunities in rural communities by providing raw material
for wood product manufacturers, they say.

Pyramid Lumber had a contract to log the property before the fire, but
the amount the company paid the Forest Service to cut the trees post-fire
has been substantially reduced, Sanders said. He added that loggers want
to help the forest. "What we've maintained in the industry is the
sooner they can get on with the recovery the sooner we can have healthy
forests."

Anyone got a match?

Today, the Forest Service is moving toward less-intrusive management
but the consequences of past actions linger.

Two key pieces of legislation have guided the Forest Service's management
parameters. The Organic Act of 1897 provided a strategy to balance forest
preservation with its use (including harvesting) by the nation's citizens.
The Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 expanded uses, some of which
were later added. Multiple use is defined as management of renewable resources
to best meet the public's needs.

Years of "fire suppression" policy have left many forests dense
with wood that's dry and dead but not completely burned. A lightning strike
or careless camper can ignite that natural fuel, which can quickly grow
into a conflagration, threatening private property, livestock and human
lives.

Salvage logging after a disaster helps prevent that nightmare scenario,
Thompson said. By reducing the amount of kindling, so to speak, logged
areas can stop a fire from spreading or at least allow it to be contained.
Logging is sometimes necessary even before prescribed burns to help keep
such planned fires under control. (Bitterroot officials are targeting
3,000 acres for prescribed burns.)

Environmentalists and the Forest Service agree that the residue of suppressed
fires has created numerous large fires in Western forests in recent yearsnot
at all like the smaller, often less damaging fires caused by nature.

The nation paid a dear price in 2000 as more than 7 million acres of public
land burned in Western states and more than $2 billion was spent to put
them out. The Bitterroot fire threatened 1,700 homes and destroyed 70.

"What we're trying to evolve back to is more frequent fires of lower
intensity," Thompson said.

But until that happens, salvage logging will be a contentious matter.
Environmentalists oppose salvage logging for one basic reason: It interferes
with nature's plan. Cutting down a forest doesn't restore it, they argue.
Salvage harvesting often creates problems in the long run, such as the
disappearance of certain forms of wildlife, erosion and general disruption
of the ecosystem.

Dead trees have a place in the ecosystem, holding soil, creating a habitat
for small trees and animals, maintaining moisture on the site and recycling
nutrients into the soil. "A dead, burned tree out in the forest does
almost as much as a green tree," said Campbell of Friends of the
Bitterroot.

As evidence of nature's restorative ability, many groups point to Yellowstone
National Park, where a million acres burned in 1988. Today it has a thriving
ecosystem. A small study after a natural disaster in the Superior National
Forest found more birds, as well as a greater variety of them, in unsalvaged
areas compared with salvaged areas.

Cashing in, or out?

Leaving commercially sellable trees to rot is a missed economic opportunity,
some say. The cost of the entire modified recovery effortthe one
that proposed logging 41,000 acresincluding salvage logging, replanting,
seeding, road restoration and other projects, would have cost the Forest
Service at least $20 millionall money spent locally.

But in some cases, the anticipated economic impact has not materialized.
The projected impact of the modified Bitterroot plan included about 4,000
jobs and $75 million in compensation that would have multiplied throughout
the region. But something else happened in its place. The 14,000 acres
of court-approved logging that began last winter does not appear to have
created new employment. Instead, it diverted workers from other logging
projects.

Some also argue that messing with nature's time-tested recovery path could
ultimately be the state's the biggest long-term economic loss, because
forested, mountainous landscapes like that of Bitterroot have been a major
driver in the strong growth in western Montana. Salvage timber advocates
counter by saying that harvesting the burned timber would help regenerate
natural areas more quickly (though it does tend to change the vegetative
mix), which would help economic growth in the short term.

Some salvage logging more clear-cut

Not all salvage logging efforts are this contentious. On July 4, 1999,
millions of trees in the Superior National Forest of northeastern Minnesota
were blown down virtually without warning from
90-mile-per-hour straight-line winds and heavy rains. The storm stacked
trees 10 or more feet above the ground in some areas, as if the wind had
clear cut them.

A total of 477,000 acres were affected in the Superior National Forest,
which includes the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. A salvage logging
effort followed on a limited number of acres. But there was no court battle
and 67 million board feet were salvaged on federal land. After the initial
cleanup of trees that had trapped people, blocked roads and fallen on
buildings, the Forest Service proposed and executed salvage timber sales.
The harvest was completed last winter.

There is no cookie-cutter plan for restoring national forests after devastating
events, despite the existence of policies that apply to all of them. No
two situations are alike. In the Bitterroot and Superior, for example,
the type of vegetation, weather and constituencies are distinctly different
and each must be considered.

Tailoring recovery efforts to residents, users and other interested people
is critical, said Thomas Wagner, deputy forest supervisor of the Superior
National Forest. There, interested groups were brought to the damaged
areas to talk about the plan. Some objection to salvage logging was voiced,
he said, but not enough to delay action.

"The Bitterroots took the same approach but they weren't as successful
at keeping everyone at the table," said Wagner, who worked in the
Montana forest to help share the Superior's blowdown experience. Fights
over logging in the Bitterroots date back to the 1960s and scars linger
from showdowns over clear cutting in the 1970s.

Superior Forest officials took pains not to make the blowdown a media
spectacle, Wagner said, and it didn't attract the attention of national
groups in large numbers as the Bitterroot fires did.

Under the logging radar

Curiously, the departments of natural resources in both Montana and Minnesota
allowed salvage logging on state lands affected by the disasters and encountered
virtually no resistance, according to officials.

In the Bitterroot area, 14,000 acres of state-owned land burned and by
March 2002 the logging was nearly complete. About 26 million board feet
were harvested, according to Mark Lewing, Hamilton unit manager for the
Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. The sales earned
$5 million that was put into a state trust fund for schools, Lewing said.

In the Superior, about 2,500 state-owned acres were affected by the 1999
wind storm. About 37,500 cords (roughly 18.5 million board feet) were
harvested in the following year and a half, according to Ron Stoffel,
assistant regional forester in the Grand Rapids region of the Minnesota
Department of Natural Resources. Most of it was used as pulpwood for regional
paper mills. Total revenue from salvage timber sales was about $120,000.

Environmental groups offered no resistance to salvage logging after the
Minnesota disaster, Stoffel said, perhaps because most of it was in a
major tourist area, the Gunflint Trail.

Montana officials kept the public informed and "we had very little
negative comment or problems with environmental groups or anything like
this," Lewing said.

Federal regulations make it easier to delay timber sales by tying them
up in court, Stoffel noted. "States can act more quickly; federal
regulations are more stringent."